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The MIT-Portugal Program enters Phase 4
New phase will support continued exploration of ideas and solutions in fields ranging from AI to nanotech to climate — with emphasis on educational exchanges and entrepreneurship.
MIT in the world
MIT Portugal Program 2025 call for seed grant proposals
The call is open to MIT principal investigators from any of the Institute’s schools, departments, laboratories, or centers.
Four from MIT awarded 2025 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans
Fellowship honors contributions of immigrants to American society by awarding $90,000 in funding for graduate studies.
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Radio-frequency wave scattering improves fusion simulations
In the quest for fusion energy, understanding how radio-frequency (RF) waves travel (or “propagate”) in the turbulent interior of a fusion furnace is crucial to maintaining an efficient, continuously operating power plant. Transmitted by an antenna in the doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber common to magnetic confinement fusion devices called tokamaks, RF waves heat the plasma fuel […]

J-WAFS launches Food and Climate Systems Transformation Alliance
Food systems around the world are increasingly at risk from the impacts of climate change. At the same time, these systems, which include all activities from food production to consumption and food waste, are responsible for about one-third of the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions warming the planet. To drive research-based innovation that will make food […]

Embarking upon a leadership journey
Current developments in the Middle East continue to challenge people in the region and open windows to make a sustainable impact. Challenges like water access, health care, IT, vocational training, and others can be addressed collaboratively with entrepreneurial and novel problem-solving capabilities. To do so, future leaders need to understand the challenges through a regional […]

Scientists project increased risk to water supplies in South Africa this century
In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa’s second most populous city, came very close to running out of water as the multi-year “Day Zero” drought depleted its reservoirs. Since then, researchers from Stanford University determined that climate change had made this extreme drought five to six times more likely, and warned that a lot more Day Zero events could […]

Diagnosing cancer with a barcode-inspired test
As Dana Al-Sulaiman peers into a microscope, a row of dots appears on a slide. These dots can help provide a cancer diagnosis. Al-Sulaiman was inspired by barcodes found on consumer products. “I got the idea from my PhD supervisor, who said, ‘in the future you’ll be able to scan a diagnostic test like you’re […]

Toward speech recognition for uncommon spoken languages
Automated speech-recognition technology has become more common with the popularity of virtual assistants like Siri, but many of these systems only perform well with the most widely spoken of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages. Because these systems largely don’t exist for less common languages, the millions of people who speak them are cut off from […]

Networking on a global scale
While international travel continues to be limited in much of the world, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) sought to capitalize on the increased digital connectivity brought about by the pandemic by developing cutting-edge virtual programs designed to allow students to be exposed to international education and build connections around the world. MISTI is […]

A new way to generate light using pre-existing defects in semiconductors
Researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, together with collaborators at MIT, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), have discovered a new method of generating long-wavelength (red, orange, and yellow) light using intrinsic […]

Solving puzzles of international trade, war, and order
For Mariya Grinberg, the start of a research project often begins with a near-tangible sense of irritation. “I’d read something, a definition or idea that doesn’t make sense, that seems logically inconsistent — and it prickles,” says Grinberg, who joined the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor on July 1. “I try to […]

Education in Latin America after the pandemic
In early 2020, Covid-19 forced countries across Latin America to take measures to keep children, young people, and adults away from schools. Many countries have declared educational quarantines as part of efforts to stop the pandemic, but more than a year-and-a-half later, governments are already thinking, what is next? While the pandemic may not be […]